Ethics can’t be compartmentalized
Jim Thompson
By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
If it wasn’t so serious, we could laugh. Calling Elon Musk evil, stupid or worse is simply silly.
I don’t agree with his marital arrangement(s), but there have been plenty of those to criticize over the years. He is obviously brilliant. You don’t become the richest person in the world by being dumb. His company SpaceX has run circles around the publicly funded NASA. As far as stealing your data from Social Security, he points out he already had it when he was with PayPal.
He is working for nothing and being lambasted on X, which he fully owns. He broke the code on how to build EVs – Teslas are everywhere.
The reality we must face now is this: ethics cannot be compartmentalized. It is becoming extremely clear, thanks to Musk and DOGE, that the federal government is full of unethical players. Many employees of the federal government have likely committed crimes of theft of real dollars or of time they supposedly were working.
USAid seems to be a money-launder’s vessel of choice. Did it do a fantastic and great job at one point in time? Unquestionably, yes. But in the present, it is apparently a very bad player. When cleaned up and safeguards are installed, perhaps it can be great again.
Social Security seems to have a problem. It has a somewhere between 12 million and 16 million recipients over the age of 100. If they are just getting a dollar apiece per month (highly unlikely), that is “only” $144-$160 million per year. If they are getting $900 each per month (more likely), that is $130-$173 BILLION per year.
Global warming is being called out for what it is – a fraud costing us uncounted dollars in higher energy costs.
Who knows what fraud Medicare is going to turn up. Everyone, Democrats and Republican, have said for a long time there is fraud in Medicare.
There are many other inefficiencies, if not fraud, in the government. Trump and Musk are going to have their hands full as they try to cut jobs in specific congressional districts. The Iron Mountain debacle in Pennsylvania is indicative of this.
I hope Trump and Musk fully succeed. I saw such a scorched earth program succeed in a papermill in Rittman, Ohio in the 1980s. I was a small piece of a team of three managers who came into “right the ship” of a 90-year-old paper mill with a lot of bad habits and a lot of “we’ve only done it this way” attitude…and a lot of fraud.
In one year, we got it to making its first legitimate profit in 25 years. All the time, the old-timers said we were destroying it. Headquarters had already been threatening to shut it down, but the locals didn’t believe them. It lasted another 20 years after we got it straightened out. It probably had less than 18 months to live when we first got there. We used the same tactics as Musk.
Trump and Musk can make rapid improvements like we did. They can make ethical behavior the norm, not the exception. They can stop the bleeding and move toward a balanced budget. They can hold the government responsible for spending our tax dollars. They can make America great again.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He can be reached at jthompson@taii.com.
Comment
TOXIC Climate Engineering Reality
"Global warming is being called out for what it is – a fraud costing us uncounted dollars in higher energy costs."
https://geoengineeringwatch.org/
If we do not immediately stop the continuous toxic stratospheric aerosol injection,
NOTHING else matters.
Trump and Musk
From the post: "I hope Trump and Musk fully succeed" The other side is hoping that will be the case. There is nothing wrong with the government being more efficient and not paying people to goof off at work. If you're reading this at work you are just as bad. There is something wrong when the DOGE Boys flat out lie or misrepresent things like 16 million dead people 150 years old getting SS checks. Even worse some of you believe it. And it takes a "genius" like Musk to fool you. It's just the old playbook of monetizing everything where we're supposed to hate providing something we all pay for collectively that can instead be sold. Like healthcare, education and public services. Instead, you pay them instead of taxes and they provide the service, but at a higher cost to be profitable. Just an example, it's said that Medicare Advantage private insurance plans cost the program 20% more than traditional Medicare. But the current administration would like to make Advantage the default choice. That doesn't sound very efficient.
Soc. Sec.
We wondered why Social Security was predicted to be insolvent soon. The politicians and the bureaucrats have been running a shoddy and fraudulent program.